The dead give up their names

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/07/2010 (5740 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The laboratories of the pathology department at the Health Sciences Centre are lit by the sickly white of fluorescent lighting, not the dark hues of blue and green of TV crime dramas. There is no glossy Hollywood set, no one-hour time limit, no wise-cracking coroners.

The recent grisly discovery of a man’s body tangled up in driftwood near the docks at The Forks was one of 10 bodies, on average, that are pulled from the water in Manitoba every year, says the province’s chief medical examiner.

Each of them is a puzzle for Winnipeg’s forensic scientists.

 

Theirs is a gruesome but highly skilled art and one in regular demand in a province with so many lakes and rivers. Just where do investigators begin when bodies wash ashore?

The most recent case, the man’s body washed up at The Forks, was a slam dunk to identify — a bank card was found in his pocket. But not every body comes with ID to make a medical examiner’s job a little easier.

Still, forensic pathologist Dr. Charles Littman says his investigators have a near-perfect record rate at identifying victims.

"All the cases I’ve been involved with, we’ve made an identification," said the Scottish doctor, who has autopsied some 6,000 bodies in his 25-year career. And while it may seem like sodden, waterlogged bodies can be the most difficult cases, water acts in ways to help preserve the structure of the body rather than destroy it, he said.

"(Water) can maintain certain features of the body," he said. "Obviously the actual tissues themselves have deteriorated, but the actual structure of the body is maintained.”

The amount of preservation, of course, depends on a number of things: the temperature of the water, how much clothing the person was wearing, the amount of fat on the body.

"Depending on the state of decomposition and the state of the body, you may still get fingerprints, even with a body submerged." Littman continued. "The skin can slough off, it actually comes off like a glove, and the identification officer can actually put his finger or fingers in that glove and get fingerprints."

Pathologists are able to determine the sex of a person by the size and shape of the pelvic bone, said Dr. Thambirajah Balachandra, the province’s chief medical examiner. Teeth are used to help determine age, along with "skull sutures," zig-zag lines on the skull that form around 18 to 20 years of age, when bones in the skull fuse together.

Once a body is tentatively identified, oral pathologists seek to match dental records. The science deepens when other experts, such as entomologists, are brought in to help figure out just how a body ended up where it did.

"We found a body once out in the bush and the type of fly that was on this body was the type of flies that in fact congregate around street lamps," Littman said. "And because of that we were able to determine this body had been killed elsewhere and then taken out there and dumped."

Added Balachandra: "If we are diligent and if we apply the basic principles (of forensics), we should be able to identify everybody."

The task is already painstakingly long, meticulous and difficult, but some people go to great lengths to leave as few clues as possible, trying to ensure their identity will remain forever unknown.

Those cases can tie up one of Balachandra’s seven investigators for months.

Janice Epp, one of those investigators, recalled one of her cases nine years ago when a body was found in a car out in the bush near Thompson. A hose was found running from the car’s exhaust pipe and into the car. The man had committed suicide, death by carbon monoxide poisoning.

"He was mummified, which means you can’t identify him by looking at him," Epp said, adding it was impossible to tell exactly how long he had been there.

The man had no personal ID and the vehicle identification numbers on the door panels had been filed off. The only lead Epp had was a months-old receipt from a gas station found in the car’s trunk.

Except, as Epp explained, "What most people don’t realize is that there’s five other VIN numbers on cars put on by manufacturers. Each year, those numbers are put on specific, non-removal parts of the car but no one knows where they are. In 2003 it will be in this location, in 2004 it will be in this location, and only the manufacturers know that."

When she was able to track down the numbers, Epp traced the owner of the car to California. "From there we were able to find family members in Illinois and once we found family members, we collected DNA samples from them and sent the DNA from the person’s body and the family for comparison."

All told, the investigation took eight months, half of it waiting to confirm DNA results.

"Most people, we know who they are (right away)," said Epp. "Some just take longer."

 

Some 1,200 autopsies are performed each year in Manitoba.

About 50 of those are homicides. Up to 150 are suicides. Drownings, workplace accidents, car crashes and other accidents make up the rest.

About 10 new cases are reported to the office of the chief medical examiner every day, or 70 each week. Seven cases are from Winnipeg, while three are from other parts of Manitoba, Balachandra said. Ninety per cent of remains end up being from animals.

"Whenever they find anything boney, they bring it to our office," he said. "We have to decide whether or it is human or not. Once we find it is human, we find out if it is archeological or recent. If there is flesh still attached to the body, or if it smells, or if it has hairs attached, we know it’s recent.

"If it’s of a recent origin, then we have a case," he said.

Littman says his family and friends haven’t given him any gruesome nicknames to match his job, and Balachandra says pathologists try to not let their gruesome task get to them.

"When you are doing a job, it’s the questions that are haunting you," he said. "You don’t pay attention to the smell or anything.

"You are searching for clues."

matt.preprost@freepress.mb.ca

Defying identification

On May 9, 2003, Deuong Cheron checked into Room 7 at the Northbrook Inn in Grand Rapids, Man.

He arrived on a bus from Thompson. It was 3:30 a.m. He paid in cash.

Fifteen hours hours later, the motel housekeeper found Cheron in his room, slumped over in a chair after he had hanged himself.

The information he provided at check-in — his name and address in Winnipeg — turned out to be bogus. Seven years later, he remains the biggest mystery eluding Manitoba medical investigators, and one of just two that have "defied identification," says Dr. Thambirajah Balachandra, the province’s chief medical examiner. (Compare that to California, where 150 bodies are still waiting to be identified at any given time, he said.)

The failure to identify is not for a lack of trying.

Cheron, or rather, whoever he was, had no identification on him. The name he used to check into the motel has been cross-referenced to practically every missing-persons list in North America, and in Asian countries. They’ve even run variations of another name on a medical bag found in the room. No luck.

Fingerprints have been run through databases with no matches, which implies he’s never done anything criminal. Even an official from the South Korean Embassy in Ottawa came to Winnipeg to help trace the fingerprints. Every citizen is fingerprinted at 18 years of age in the Asian country, Balachandra said. If Cheron is Korean, he either left the country before he was 18 or was not born there, he said.

The whole thing has put a tiny but noticeable blemish on the Sri Lankan doctor’s otherwise impressive record — he has autopsied 10,000 bodies since 1977, and this is the only case he hasn’t found an ending for.

"We have been successful in all our cases except this one," he said, shaking his head.

"It’s a challenge, but that’s the nature of the work," he said. "I just want to bring closure to the family."

 

Baby Innocence

Baby Innocence is the name authorities gave to this little boy whose remains were found in April 1984 in a shallow grave along the banks of the Seine River in St. Boniface.

It’s the only other unsolved case listed under Manitoba on the international database run by the International Center for Unidentified and Missing Persons.

Spring runoff exposed the grave. Investigators believe the boy died the previous fall, very shortly after he was born. A cause of death is not listed.

The only clue police have is that a Caucasian man in his early 20s was seen in the area either in the late summer or early fall carrying an infant child.

The man and the baby have never been identified.